


Beyond the Rim: Diagnosis

by Jameson9101322



Series: Beyond the Rim [3]
Category: Babylon 5
Genre: Alternate Universe - Afterlife, Gen, beyond the rim
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-08
Updated: 2019-09-03
Packaged: 2020-04-23 01:48:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19141129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jameson9101322/pseuds/Jameson9101322
Summary: Dr. Franklin finds himself in an odd world filled with departed friends. While reconnecting with these people is fine, this /dream/ is merely a distraction from the state of his health outside of it. How can he diagnose himself within this coma state? Or contact the doctors that must be trying to help him? He could die from this! And he couldn't die, not when he had so much to take care of. He was too healthy to have died so young....





	1. Loss of Consciousness

**Author's Note:**

> This work is part of a series. It is not necessary to read the previous stories to understand what is going on, but at least reading Beyond the Rim: Sheridan will give new readers a more well-encompassed understanding of the rules of the AU. I won't be retreading every aspect of the lore in this fic, but I promise not to abandon new readers here for the first time.

Dr. Stephen Franklin was in the middle of a tennis game when he felt a pressure on his chest. He staggered, the world spinning, and collapsed on the court. A loud ringing drowned out Dr. Charles’ voice. Franklin struggled. He shut his eyes to combat the light-headedness. When they opened, he was in a field of white light.

“What?”

The chest pain was gone. So was the court, although he was still holding his racket. The sense of dread remained, though. Franklin scrambled back to his feet and spun to take in the featureless environment. 

“Hello?” 

His voice didn’t carry. There was no room sound, and the absence felt like cotton in his ears. 

“Hello!?” 

Shouts did not echo, either. A new pressure constricted his chest, although this one easier to diagnose. Fear. He tamped it down. A doctor was not allowed to feel fear until he was certain what was wrong.

“Okay,” he said aloud. “Focus. What happened?”

Pressure. Light-headedness, Ringing in ears. All signs pointed to lack of oxygen. Blood-pressure drop? He had been really stressed, what with the Porzm pathogen, but he’d dealt with xenonotic diseases before – the Drakh plague being a prime example – and he was only consulting on this one. Still his coffee intake had spiked as bad as it used to back on Babylon 5. No stims this time, though. Not that he wasn’t tempted, an ex-addict is always haunted by that demon to at least some extent, but he was smart enough to know reopening that box was like inviting a vampire in. He was a master of himself. He’d be master of the pathogen, too, if he wasn’t so overworked. That’s why he and Charles started tennis. Stress management. Obviously it wasn’t working as well as he’d hoped…. Perhaps all the white meant he was taken to a clinic?

The ground blended with the walls, the air, and the ceiling. Everything was stark whiteness with no break in between. If it was a clinic it was alien and no style of medicine he’d seen before. They hadn’t even put him on a bed, or changed him out of his work out clothes. That spoke to being in a hurry. Was this quarantine? Was the lab compromised? What were the symptoms of Prozm in humans?

It gave scaled persons molt and furred persons mange. Franklin checked his bare arms for rash but found nothing. Would inflammation explain the chest pain? He needed his notes. 

“Hey!?” He shouted again. “Who’s out there?”

If this was a quarantine chamber there had to be a wall somewhere. Franklin started to walk, then run. He still felt a sense of ground under his athletic shoes, but the room was off-puttingly large and there were no landmarks to measure progress by. Not even the movement of air. Who would build such a place? He slowed to a stop.

This was impossible architecture. He recalled reading an article about schizophrenics who thought they’d experienced alien abductions, way back before mankind actually met extra-terrestrial life. A man probably couldn’t diagnose his own mental illness, but Franklin knew this was off. At least there were no metal slabs or tiny gray men, although at this point companionship would have been comforting. At least he could ask them what was going on.

“This has to be a hallucination,” he panted aloud. “Perhaps I’m having a seizure? I mean, People say they see white lights, perhaps that’s it.”

He didn’t think he was schizophrenic… of course it’s likely he wouldn’t know. Mental episodes can have a variety of reasons. Prozm maybe? The conclusion remained that this place was not a real location. Panic crept in, but Franklin breathed deep to control it. He was breathing pretty good having just sprinted some yards. Breathing better than he had in years, in fact. Perhaps he was being treated on the outside. Evidence still pointed toward a circulatory episode. Perhaps a heart attack? More likely an aneurysm. Good thing Dr. Charles was a neurologist. Hopefully he noted the symptoms in time to bring him out of this. Unless this weird void was his coma… that would mean he was stuck here.

“Hey!” Franklin shouted with edging desperation. “Charles? Anybody? I’m still in here! Don’t pull my plug or anything!” 

“Hi Stephen.” 

Another voice! Thank god! Franklin spun on his heel to see a man in his mid-thirties. It wasn’t Dr. Charles, for sure. Even stranger, he was dressed in an Army of Light uniform like he, himself, wore during the Earth Civil war back on Babylon 5. The uniform was the rubber band that snapped the face and the voice into place. 

John Sheridan extended a hand. “Welcome home, Stephen. It’s great to see you.”

“John...” Franklin hesitated to take the hand. If this was a hallucination Sheridan was obviously a part of it. If it wasn’t a hallucination, this could be a trick. “Who are you really?”

“I know it’s probably a shock to you,” he said. “I had the option to come to you looking the way I did when we last met, but I thought perhaps a blast from the past would be better considering the shock you must be in.”

“Shock?” 

“Your death.” Sheridan’s eyebrows arched. “You do know what happened to you… right?”

The tone irked Franklin more than it’s supposed ‘news.’ “Who are you, really?”

“I’m John. Your friend.” Sheridan rubbed his eyes. “Ugh, I can see I messed this up already. Sorry, you’re my first ‘welcome home’ assignment, and I’ve been really excited about it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Sorry,” Sheridan said again. “It hasn’t been that long since I was in your shoes. Probably feels longer for you, actually. Time is weird here.”

“Where is this place?”

Sheridan brightened, apparently delighted to explain something. “This is Limbo! The border between life and death.”

All of Franklin’s red flags went up. He went to cross his arms and realized he was still holding his tennis racket. “That’s ridiculous. There’s no such thing as ‘Limbo’.”

“It’s got some crazy old-ones name, but Limbo works well enough,” Sheridan said. “It’s where souls make important choices about their fate – get recycled into the lifestream or pass beyond the Rim and live with us.”

Franklin’s hackles rose. “I’m not going anywhere except back to reality! I have a job to do and no hallucination’s going to stop me from doing it.”

“Bull-headed as ever, I guess I can’t blame you.”

Sheridan took a step toward him. Franklin took an equal step back, the racket held in front of him like a weapon.

Sheridan shook his head. “I’m not going to hurt you, Stephen. I know I did a bad job of this, but it’s John, remember? We’re friends. You can trust me.”

“That’s exactly what a hallucination _would_ say,” Franklin scoffed. 

“I’m not a hallucination.”

“You’re dead!” Franklin said. “You’ve been dead for over a decade!” 

“You’re dead, too!”

“No, I’m not!” He snapped.

“You collapsed on the tennis court. Your heart gave out.”

“No it didn’t,” he stated, but doubt crept in. Heart problems would explain the chest pain and blood pressure drop, but he had no history of heart problems. His last checkup was impeccable. “I’m in peak physical health.”

“Be that as it may, here you are.”

“I’m not anywhere.” There was a tremble in Franklin’s voice. He took another deep breath. “Hopefully I’m on a stretcher with people monitoring my condition. You’re random firings of neurons in my undernourished brain, and when I wake up – which I will – you’ll be a story to tell Delenn.”

Sheridan paused at the name and dropped his arms to his sides. “Maybe we need to handle this another way.”

He turned away and pressed a hand to his ear. Franklin lowered his racket and trained his ears toward Sheridan’s murmurs. He picked out individual words – experiment, delusion, alternative – the acoustics of the odd space must have been amazing for such soft sounds to be so clear, since he never wore his hearing aid during tennis. Of course his body was probably in an ambulance, and hallucinations didn’t have rules. 

“Okay, Steve.” Sheridan said finally. “I can see you’re not really of sound mind right now, which again I don’t blame you for. It took me a while, too, and I had twenty years of forewarning. I can’t convince you I’m who I say I am, but I can prove I’m not malicious. For now, think of me as a flicker of your conscience. A figment of your imagination conjured to ease this weird in-between time while you struggled for life.”

Franklin rolled his eyes. “Oh come on.”

“What? That’s what you thought I was already, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, but you don’t have to be so Soap Opera about it.”

Sheridan shrugged. “I tried. Come on, I’ve gotten permission to give you a preview.”

“Permission? From who?”

“Never mind, you’ll just complain about it,” Sheridan scoffed.

A white doorway opened In the whiteness. Franklin rushed to the ‘wall’ beside it to find none there. He could see behind and all around it, but it was a doorway in space. “Is this a jump gate?”

“Kind of.”

“Are we in slip space?”

“I… guess?” Sheridan puzzled over the answer. “Step through and see.”

Franklin frowned. He didn’t believe in metaphysical nonsense, or out-of body experiences, or speaking with ghosts, but dreams were nonsensical and the whiteness was unnerving and curiosity… curiosity was invigorating. 

“Fine.” Franklin reached toward the light, but paused. The surface of the white panel crackled at the tips of his fingers. “This isn’t going to scramble my atoms and kill me is it?”

Sheridan sucked his lips with a wide shake of his head. “Nope, can’t say it’s going to do that.”

“Okay...” Franklin breathed again. “You’re my brain… so I trust you.”

“Glad we’ve arrived at an understanding.”

Franklin closed his eyes and pressed his hand into the light beam. It felt charged like electricity – perhaps the manifestation of a stimulation procedure in the real world? It was pointless to rationalized. He just hoped that whatever was happening out there, his peers would handle it as he stepped through the portal and into delusion.


	2. Symptomatic

Outside of this odd dreamlike metaphor, the charged doorway could have been anything -- defibrillator, electric shock therapy -- both of those should have come with pain. The door wasn't pleasant really, but it didn't feel like volts slicing through your body. And Franklin knew what it felt like. He'd been tazed a couple times, once by a campus guard back in his more rowdy days, and once sloppy intern. Cheated death on that one. A second earlier and his would be the second quivering heart in the ER. No, the door had a charge but the bigger shock was what he saw on the other side of it. He stepped from white nothingness on one side onto the buffed metal floors of a station long dead. Babylon 5.

Franklin's mind locked up a moment trying to process it. The station was decades gone but he knew the bulkheads and balustrades so well, there was no doubt it was B5. He even knew what floor he was on. Awestruc, he spun in time to see Sheridan join him through the white panel. Instead of thirty-five and dressed as an Earth Force captain, John was now forty-five and robed as Entil'zha. Franklin rolled his eyes. "Oh come on!"

Sherdian looked down and his many layers. "What? You don't like this either?"

"For the love of god, John," Franklin said. "You meet me in nowhere looking like you belong on Babylon 5 and you take me to Babylon 5 dressed like we're supposed to be on Minbar. Next you'll be at ISA headquarters dressed like Bozo the Clown."

"Nope, I've only been given permission to bring you here," Sheridan said. "You think you're having a hallucination."

"I AM having a hallucination."

"Case in point," Sheridan said. "This is an impossible place that'll put you at ease." 

"Minbari hypocrisy at it's finest." Franklin reached for the wall of the chamber and noticed his sleeve. He was dressed in his own army of light uniform. And his tennis racket had vanished. "Hey!"

"What now?"

"When did my clothes change?"

"When you walked through the portal. You changed, too, not that you'd notice. You're a creature of light now."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"Just what I said. You felt the shift, I'm sure." Sheridan walked the hall and motioned for Franklin to join him. "You've got a body again."

"Again?"

"You were just spirit before. Didn't you notice the lack of context? A void of space?" 

"Now you're talking like Kosh," Franklin snorted.

"Sorry, this is more his field of expertise." Sheridan regarded the structures around them. "Looks pretty good doesn't it? G'Kar likes to bring up how spaces retain the souls of those in them. I always kind of felt the place had a heart of it's own. In the end I think we were both right... it joined us almost the moment it was slain and it's likeness improves a little every day. I'm looking forward to what someone like you is going to add. You loved the place as much as the rest of us. Knew medbay down to the rivet, but you knew down below just as well. I can't wait to see how it'll manifest."

"If this is an image from my memories. It'll look the same as it did. Full of the sick, the poor, the abandoned.... waiting for someone to help them and refusing the help at the same time." 

Sheridan sobered. "So a lot like you."

Franklin reached out as they walked and dragged his fingers along the wall. The metal was cold and solid as he remembered. The reclaimed air circling through the vents smelled like industrial scrubbers with a hint of ozone. The gravitational rotators clanged faintly all around them, like the heartbeat of a patient in a metabolic chamber. "I really am a part of this place. It made me what I am, today. I treated more types of aliens in this station than anyone else in the galaxy, yet it's the human suffering that haunts me."

"Just the humans?"

"... No. There was enough for everyone." Franlkin lowered his hand. "The Porzm have released a bioweapon on their quadrant of space. I've been working on it for weeks."

"I'm sorry you left it unfinished."

"But I haven't," Franklin snapped. "I told you. This is a fever dream brought on by stress or exhaustion. You, this station, everything is a part of it. And me..." The spark of an idea ignited. He clutched as his uniform jacket. "I'm part of it, too. I'm the conscious part of my mind that can still solve the problem. This time from from inside the pathogen instead of the outside."

Sheridan bit his lip. "Stephen?"

"Hush." Franklin stopped walking. "I'm on Babylon 5. That has to be significant. I'm supposed to remember something." He snapped his fingers. "The Markab Epidemic! Back on Babylon 5 the Markab contracted a species-wide epidemic that targeted specific cells within their bodies responsible for uptake in their brains."

"I remember the Markab, Stephen."

"Lazarenn and I worked so hard to make that cure but we were too late. Perhaps the discoveries made in this place at that time play into the Porzm somehow. Not the same way of course, there's no neurological element -- excusing this dream I'm in, anyway. The problem must be cellular. My symptoms speak to lack of oxygen. Perhaps the lungs? Maybe blood. Red cells conduct cellular communication not wholly dissimilar to yellow and green cells, and nearly every species in the galaxy has a liquid portion of their biology."

Sheridan grabbed his shoulder and snapped the doctor's focus back to the present. "You have a brilliant mind, but this isn't why I brought you here. I came here to talk about the afterlife."

Franklin narrowed his eyes. The little pops of inspiration dissolved into suspicion. If Sheridan was part of his mind... which part would ask him to stop thinking. "Let go of me."

"I want you to promise you're going to calm down."

"I'm not making promises to you." Franklin backed away. "What are you? The proverbial grim reaper? The mental compartmentalization of my will to live telling me to give up and die?"

Sheridan rubbed a hand down his face. "You're dead already!"

"Nope! Not today." Franklin began pacing. "Not when I'm so close."

"You're wasting your time on this," Sheridan said. "You aren't suffering from an illness and you can't talk to the living. You're dead! This is your time to rest and be at peace. All eternity is waiting for you to meet it. You've got friends and family waiting. I'm supposed to take you to them!"

"Chest pressure," Franklin mumbled. "Loss of consciousness. Hallucination..."

If it was cellular the pathogen could cripple key functions, but the labs came back from patients without any major deviations in bloodcount. Was it trojan? Perhaps something modern technology couldn't register. They'd cross-checked numbers of subjects both healthy and ill. He'd checked it with Porzm biology. It was getting too complicated. Perhaps instead of circulatory it was respiratory. Not all sufferers breathed oxygen. A combination? He wished he had his notes.

"Stephen? Are you listening?"

Sheridan was talking again. He definitely wasn't something provided by his brain for usefulness. Franklin spun to find an impatient look on his old friend's graying face.

"I can tell this is your means of coping." Sheridan's voice softened in a pandering, almost fatherly way. "You take however as much time you need here. I'll be back in a bit."

Franklin crossed his arms. "You give up so easy?"

"Not giving up. Giving... space." Sheridan gestured to the corridor. "The station is yours for now. Go anywhere you like. Its incomplete, and not nearly as big as the real one was, but it's the same place we all loved and it'll provide you whatever you desire as long as the desire is sincere."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"The Rim is the closest we can get to the undiluted consciousness of the Universe. It can anticipate your need but refuses to be manipulated. It knows you better than you know yourself." Sheridan's face soured as Franklin steeled himself. He folded his arms in the sleeves of his Ranger robes. "But I can see you're not going to listen to me."

"Damn right I'm not."

"Okay." Sheridan triangled his hands and bowed sardonically and stomped away up the hall. Franklin took off in the other direction. Good riddance to him, he was a distraction anyway. Franklin had a lot of notes to recreate. He needed his office.

The feel of the corridors was the same, but the layout was different. The absence of any other people aboard emphasized this Babylon 5's illusion. It was eerie. He took a lift up to the Red decks, but found there was only one. The Zocolo, the markets, everything was gone. In their place was something like a shrine. Fifty feet of open space filled with artifacts, models, photos of people and events that mattered, and paintings of how those moments felt. A timeline hovered in space above his head. He followed it until he a glowing orb. The day of his arrival in 2258, highlighted by a bright star that expanded to display his young face. So long ago. He was a completely different person then. He had no idea what was in store along the branching paths. What wasn't displayed for historical record returned to his mind as vividly as the holograms on display -- victory, defeat, war, alliance... ideals, losses, addition, betrayal, determination, hopelessness. 

Franklin's heart pounded. His hands itched like he was back on stims, and the longing snapped instantly into fear. He rushed away from the shrine and back to the lift.

Nausea. Increased heart rate. Mood swings. He wiped a tear out of his eye and tried to bury the memories. He was getting sicker, that was it. He had to organize his thoughts or he'd go crazy. The lift doors opened -- had he input any directions? -- and he exited to the blue and silver gleam of a place he felt more comfortable than his own quarters. Babylon 5's medbay. Franklin's heart rate doubled again. It was exactly as he remembered; the wards with tightly made beds, blue-tinted lights, monitors beeping faintly along the walls. He breathed the tinny antiseptic-scented air of the instrument room in heavy gulps. Everything glittered with the sterility that gave his surgeon's heart deep comfort. Everything but the lack of people. 

No doctors and nurses. No patients. No messages on the boards. It was wrong on a level somehow deeper than his bones. He shook his head as if the feeling could be dislodged. No. The station was still a hallucination. He needed to use it for clues and yes, for comfort too, but not for rest. He still had work to do. Franklin jogged the remaining steps to his old office and exhaled a cloud of nerves. His desk was as it was the day he handed it off to Dr. Hobbs. The instant coffee machine was on, the computer was waiting for use, and to the right of the desk, an old-fashioned whiteboard waited for the figures and calculations knocking about in the back of his head. Franklin had found his center. He cracked his knuckles. It was time to get to work.


	3. Chapter 3

_Porzm: Anemia. Weakness. Rash and Inflammation._

_Drafa Plague (Markab): Sore throat. Weakness. Euphoria._

_Me: Chest pain. Weakness. Loss of consciousness. Hallucination._

“Weakness, mental affect.” Franklin muttered to himself and scribbled on a data pad. “Organ failure starts with bleed and rupture, so that could be blood pressure. What were the Porzm averages? Damn if only I could remember.”

He jotted down a couple numbers, hoping instinct would lead him to something accurate. He was trapped in his own mind after all, all the information he’d ever absorbed was in here somewhere if he stirred it around enough. Medbay beeped and buzzed like it always had, but everything felt hollow without people. He needed his team. Someone to check his math. Even just someone to talk to.

Franklin tapped the nearest wall-mounted screen and pulled up another case file from the Babcon archives. He’d forgotten how old everything on Babylon 5 was. Wall mounted units? Back at the university he had state of the art holographic displays and modular screen systems that let him whip stuff around his office like a wizard. Here he had to actually press buttons. It was arcane. Things would go so much faster if he could mentally dictate onto a holographic tailing screen. 

“Let’s think about what’s happening on the outside,” he said aloud to break the silence. “Charles would have called EMT. Then I’d be on a stretcher. Amphetamines and saline for the blood pressure assuming that’s what it is. I’m unconscious now or else I wouldn’t be dreaming, so perhaps a sedative as well. If it’s Porzm it’s quite painful. Perhaps that was the white light? That doesn’t make sense. More likely the white light was adrenaline or something. I should start another list.”

Firing up a diagram, Franklin started slotting in his history and symptoms. Chest pain, sudden weakness, loss of consciousness, hallucination. No rash though…. Not that the skin he was wearing was his real skin. His body was out _there_ somewhere, encompassing this reconstruction of Babylon 5. Perhaps the inflammation was what caused the blood pressure drop – it would make sense. Constriction and redirection of blood and fluids to the surface would rob essential nutrients from the brain. The chest pain could just be stress, although he wasn’t content with that. Symptoms that occurred at the same time often had the same source. 

Family history; stroke, heart attack, vascular disease. Perhaps he had a predisposition for heart trouble aggravated by the pathogen. There weren’t any other case examples that showed evidence of that, but it wasn’t out of the question. Again, he was perfectly healthy at his last checkup. He kept himself as healthy as he could as a rule, especially after his bout with stimulant addiction. When you have heart disease on one side and vascular disease on the other it’s best to keep an eye on those kind of things, regardless. Franklin wondered if he could experiment on his body in the dream and get accurate results for his body in the waking world. It wasn’t like he had a lot of choice.

He crossed his office to the collection of tools and readers he’d been massing. There was barely any counter space, but running all over the empty bay was distracting. He moved a tray of sterile utensils and selected a hypodermic tube. It wasn’t until he was rolling his sleeve that he noticed he was dressed in his blue medico scrubs. When had that happened? He hadn’t changed at any point. Franklin reached behind him to chalk another tic mark beside “hallucination.”

The hypodermic sucked three premeasured blood samples from the hallow of his elbow. Franklin discharged them into different centrifuges. Viscosity, platelet, O2, white cell, tox screen… one by one the results appeared on his monitors. These numbers were absolutely familiar, he’d been staring at similar figures desperately for hours that morning. It was Porzm. Confirmed. That's what did it.

Franklin exhaled a shaky breath. The news wasn’t good, but it was something to go on. He fitted himself with a monitor to track heart rate and respiration, drew another set of samples from his forearm, and ran the tests again for confirmation. His own beeps added to the chorus of chimes. 

Late-stage Porzm saw patients too weak and painful to move. Skin swelled and cracked. Puss impacted normal function of sensory organs. According to the monitor, his temperature was below normal. That was a good sign for now, it meant the storm was yet to start. Still, there was limited time to draw up a treatment. They had a retardant working in about half the laboratory samples – no human tests of course but there was always a first. Franklin reconstructed his the team’s equations, cold sweat breaking along his neck. If he got this wrong he could put himself into cardiac arrest or worse. Damn he wished he had his notes.

What kind of doctor fell victim to the same illness he was trying to cure? He was the foremost xenobiologist in the galaxy, he knew better than to contaminate himself. Perhaps he was getting old. Forgetful. More likely it was someone in the lab… a containment breech or something. Maybe a lid was left cracked in the hot lab. Something that evaporated overnight without the meters picking it up. How stupid could they be? Now the one person who could solve this problem was suffering from it. 

Anger added to his ticking pulse. Franklin’s ears rang as he searched the cabinets for the compounds he needed. Everything was where here remembered it in the amounts he needed to use. He set the more specific chemicals in the processor to synthesize and began portioning out the rest. The treatment required five doses first to attack the pathogen right away, then more later as his condition progressed. His heart rate monitor bleated continuously as he shuffled around the office. He needed to rest but there was no time, not with his own life now in the balance. If only he had his staff – or at least the portion that were competent.

The confirmation tests came back positive as well. His white cell count was rising rapidly. Franklin tapped the top of the synthesizer in time with the flurrying beeps of his heart and dumped the completed mixture into saline with the rest. The solution frothed. Franklin readied a new hypodermic and dipped the needle below the fizz to draw the first dose. This was going to knock him on his ass… maybe he should lay down. 

No time. The longer he went without the retardant the faster the disease would consume him. His hands felt swollen as he rolled up his sleeve and pressed the hypodermic to his skin. 

He paused just before puncture. What was he doing? This wasn’t real. HE wasn’t real. His body had the infection but he, himself, was a mental projection of his unconscious mind. There was no point to retarding the progress of what his body had, mental chemicals were not real chemicals. No. What he _was_ was a case study. He had Porzm afflicted blood in ample supply, and all of Babylon 5’s medbay to play with. Let Charles worry about curing his body. In his mind, he could work on curing the rest of the universe.

Franklin withdrew the needle with a full-bodied sigh. The bleep of the heart monitor slowed into a more natural rhythm. This didn’t mean he had any more time, but took the edge of panic off its passage. He set the needle aside and drew a few more slugs of fluid from his arm to begin the experiments. He readied the centrifuge and returned to his supplies.

A bottle of phosphoric acid stood on a shelf he’d rifled earlier. He didn’t remember moving it, perhaps in his mad dash to get drugs he’d overlooked it standing there. It was a heavy bottle, though. The drawer below it was mostly empty except for some powdered iodine in a jar. That definitely wasn’t there before. He searched more thoroughly. Every drawer and cabinet he opened had exactly what he expected to be in there, even the rarer stuff the university had to order out for. It was almost like the stockroom staff had looked into the future and read his mind.

“This _is_ your mind,” Franklin said aloud. “Everything is where you want it to be because you’re the one who put it there.”

Dread bubbled up like tar from deep in his chest. Reality as he understood it relied on the assumption that everything around you obeyed certain chemical and physical principles. Magic did not exist. Things could not appear out of thin air, if that were true then what else around him was imaginary? The station? Of course it was… the real one exploded. His body? Well, yes, his real body was on a stretcher somewhere. His illness?

Franklin shivered like a dog flinging water from its coat. There was no time for speculation, he had experiments to do. He gathered the supplies he wanted and returned to his office. 

The blood he’d put in the centrifuge was done separating. He divvied out the parts to different petri dishes and applied chemicals with an eye-dropper. He had to kill the pathogen without killing the blood… or at least most of the blood. A doctor, in all practical ways, was the same thing as a poisoner. Balance chemicals, effect the body, kill only the intended target, and a doctor’s targets were more precise. It was easy to kill a man, but a tiny part of a man? That was a precision strike that would put the most advanced drones to shame. He drew another sample from himself and set it to mix with the unused retardant formula. No reason not to experiment on that, too. He was back in his element – running experiments, exploring possibilities. Like conducting a symphony of a hundred chemicals. His heart rate monitor beeped a consistent metronome tone.

The main doors at the end of the hall added a chime to the composition. Voices filtered in – Sheridan again – and another Franklin’s gut recognized before his head. The drum beat of his heart fell out of time as words echoed up the hall.

“Don’t startle him.” Sheridan said. “He’s not well.”

“I’m sure he’s fine,” the British-sounding accent of the Arisia Mining Colony answered. “You and I both know its a bit of an adjustment...”

“Yeah, but this one’s bad.”

It wasn’t possible. Marcus Cole was in cold storage on Minbar, he couldn’t be on Babylon 5. Or talking for that matter. Nausea soaked him with sweat, his body remembering the feeling of Marcus’s passing as his mind desperately pushed the thought away. It wasn’t Marcus. It was a trick. Just like Sheridan was a trick. Something conjured by a panicked psyche to keep him from his work. He went back to his notes. 

“Ahem.” Sheridan knocked on the office’s open door. “Stephen?”

“Go away.”

“I know you don’t want to see me, but I brought a friend this time.”

Franklin’s breath rattled. He steeled himself to hide his panic, but the heart monitor betrayed him. “I don’t have time to deal with more hallucinations.” The force he put in his words beat the same time as the beeping. “I have to find an antidote so I can come back to life and save the universe.”

“Ooh, he is bad.” Marcus’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Maybe you should have brought G’Kar.”

“Just talk to him.”

Marcus cleared his throat. Franklin felt him venture into the room, but kept his back turned. The dead man stopped behind him, like a ghost in a dark hall. Franklin could smell the incense of Minbari temples on his robes. 

“Hey there. Um, big day. Keeping busy, I see.”

Hair rose on Franklin’s arms.

“Whotcha workin’ on?”

The monitor beeps were getting faster. It hardly seemed possible. At this heart rate, Franklin should be light-headed and weak. His heart was working far too hard, there was no way blood was circulating properly. He continued with his tests. The powdered iodine was showing promise...

Marcus leaned in. Franklin turned from the iodine mixture to keep him out of view. If this phantom ruined his experiments, he’d be pissed.

“Hey pal,” Marcus’s voice turned up at the end like he was actually concerned. “You remember me? It’s been a couple decades now, but I’m glad to see you. You doing alright?”

“I’m not talking to you,” Franklin said. “You’re not real.”

The ranger relaxed. “So you _can_ hear me.”

“I wish I couldn’t. You’re distraction.”

“Of course I am, that’s why I’m here.”

“No you’re distracting me from my work,” Franklin snapped. “I have lives to save, including my own.”

“Ah, well, I’ve got some bad news for you about that.”

“Don’t.” Franklin blindly ruffled papers, the numbers blurred to nonsense. “You’re not real. You’re a demon. A subconscious act of sabotage.”

“Wow, okay. Ouch.”

“And you can’t fool me like John’s been trying to. I know you’re a lie.” Franklin choked on a knot. “Because you’re not dead.”

Marcus paused. “I am, though.”

“No. You’re not.” His heart rate spiked again. He could feel the jet of blood shooting past his jaw. “You’ve been rendered lifeless by an alien machine, but that doesn’t mean you’re dead. What can be taken can be given back and I’m determined to do it. For Susan’s sake if nothing else.”

“Susan asked you to do that?”

“Not asked. Made an example. She’s still looking for another machine.”

“Why? To give back the life I gave to her?”

“Something like that.”

Marcus breathed. The puff of his exhale warmed the back of Franklin’s neck. “I really wish she wouldn’t. I gave that life for a reason.”

“She didn’t ask for it.”

“It was a gift.”

“You were reckless.” Franklin clinked a test tube back into its rack a little too hard. Where was this anger coming from? He gripped the table to keep his hand from shaking. “You traumatized people. She couldn’t live with it. I couldn’t live with it. You didn’t see her after, she was suffering.”

“She was alive,” Marcus said. “I didn’t use the machine to be a hero, I did it to save someone I loved. If you’re accusing me of that I confess that I’m guilty.” 

“Why didn’t you wait?” Franklin grunted. “Someone could have helped you. We could have shared the load, we’ve done it before. Instead you fell on your own sword in the in the name of what? Chivalry? It’s not noble to give up and die.”

“I wasn’t giving up!” Marcus cried. “The exact opposite! I was watching the woman I loved die with a war going on and a solution right in front of me. You say I could have waited. Waited for what? For her heart to give out? Was I to abandon her and run through the halls begging other people to make the sacrifice? What if I was counting on someone walking in to assist me after it started, did you think about that? Or even better… that I knew the risks and I made a decision anyway, not because I’m holier than anyone, but because it was the right thing to do.”

The tremors in his hands and arms were harder to hide. Franklin closed his eyes. He breathed deep but still refused to look the ranger’s way. “You left people behind.”

“That’s what death does.”

“We didn’t know how to mourn you.”

“That’s why you had each other,” Marcus’s voice grew soft. “There’s no mourning anymore. It’s done. And I’m right here. Tell me more about how it hurt you, I want to hear how you felt. Get it into the open, so you’ll stop suffering, so we can make amends.”

“I don’t want to hear your excuses,” Franklin said. “I don’t even know why we’re talking about this. I’m in the middle of very important work.”

“So I see.”

“Sheridan was one thing,” Franklin said. “Meeting him was a shock, but Sheridan is… well… he’s Sheridan. We all knew he was dying and he made peace with it. It was easier. You? There’s no counting how many hours I spent studying that machine, researching the race that might have built it. All that was to bring you back. You’re not dead because I haven’t given up on you, yet, I’ll crack it some day, but first I have to solve this Porzm problem, and I’m in the middle of it right now. It won’t be long, I’ll wake up and then you’ll wake up, too.”

“Stephen,” Marcus’s voice caught a bit. "Don't lie about that."

“It's true.”

“A little bit maybe, but I’m thinking you're doing this for another reason,” Marcus said. “I think you’re scared of death.”

Adrenaline crimped Franklin’s stomach and lungs into a bow. “That’s nonsense.”

“I think you are,” Marcus said. “You can’t accept it happened to me, but really you can’t accept it’s happening to you. Even on the other side, you’re fighting against it when your friends are here trying to help you."

Franklin grit his teeth. "Shut up."

"I appreciate the work you put in, and the care you had, but I never asked you to save me. My life was mine to do with as I chose to, and I do not regret the choice.”

"Stop." Franklin’s racing heart broke into a million tiny pieces. He wanted to cry, but he couldn’t. Not in front of these manifestations. They were breaking him, when all he wanted was to cure people. He didn’t care about dying, everyone dies eventually, but he had more to do before then. 

Sheridan shifted in the doorway. Franklin willed him not to enter. He was the personification of the peaceful acceptance of death, and Marcus was a synonym of unmet goals. Lost potential maybe. Unfinished work.

“Stephen,” Sheridan said. “Come out of this office. You have friends and family waiting who want to help you through it. It’ll be okay, but you have to stop torturing yourself.”

“I don’t want to hear it.” Franklin held back the tears in his eyes, but couldn’t hide the tremble taking root in his voice. “This isn’t real. Nothing here is real.”

“Stephen, please,” Marcus said.

Franklin felt a hand press onto his back. It might as well have been a branding iron. He practically leaped away, seared through with the heat and presence of the ghost hovering behind him. Marcus had crossed into Franklin's physical space. Giving meaning to illusion. Franklin hit the desk, spilling utensils. He scrambled to catch them, and couldn’t avoid setting eyes on his assailant. Marcus was exactly how he left them, dressed in ranger browns, young and healthy with a dark beard, flowing hair, living eyes full of worry. His hand was still extended. Franklin could feel the memory of the touch through his scrubs.

Reality obeyed certain laws...

“Stephen,” Marcus said, aghast. “Your face!”

“Go away,” Franklin said. “I mean it. I’m very busy.”

“You look like death,” Marcus insisted. 

“He’s making himself sick.” Sheridan crossed the room toward him. “I’m not putting up with this anymore. We need to get you out.”

“Don’t touch me!”

“It’s for your own good.”

Franklin dashed to the door, his movement overturning a rack of samples. Blood and chemicals splashed onto the polished floor between himself and his pursuers. Glass broke. The heart monitor blared in a near continuous tone.

They were killing him. The ghosts were killing him by making him accept his death, but it wouldn’t work. This was the disease’s doing. Sick people can get better. He could make it happen. Dead people can come back to life with the right technology. 

Marcus and Sheridan pursued him up the hall, but he outran them. They’d never catch him if he didn’t let them, he was healthy enough for that. Franklin snatched a data pad off a desk near the door and tore off into the empty halls of Babylon 5. He needed stairs. He needed to go down. Down to the belly of the station where none of them could find him. 

Sheridan’s voice vanished in the clang of Franklin’s rubber shoes against metal staircases. He jumped half a flight at a time, banging into walls. Floor numbers flashed by in a blur as space unfolded in front of him. An elevator creaked open at the end of a long empty hallway. The station was with him. 

Franklin sprinted to the light. The doors swallowed him and he descended.


	4. Chapter 4

Downbelow was full of ghosts. 

Franklin's memories lingered. The trials of drug and deprivation he experienced in the bowels of the station was a formative event in his life. His walkabout allowed him to see through clear eyes, to think with an open mind, to confront himself face-to-face. It shaped the very perception of himself in his mind. 

The Downbelow he walked in the station was the one from that memory. Every step took him to a new landmark of his journey -- the recycling plants, the water reclamation wing, the trash compactors -- they traced his own evolution, daring him to remember. They were ghosts that had power, but they were not the ghosts that haunted him. 

Figures sat among the tents. Weird half-existent things both present and not present. He recognized some initially, but a second glance would change their shape, or size, or color, or race. None had faces. He tried to study them but they sifted in and out of his brain brain like sand. None had bodies, yet he felt them breathing. Their eyes followed him for leagues out of their skulls. A crowd of invisible oppressors circled him in constant rings as he rushed between their shelters. 

He had to find his free clinic. It was not as well equipped as medbay but it had synthesizers and Babcom access and could help him pick up where he left off. The eyeless faces followed his progress as he picked through the labyrinth of half-collapsed crates and hand-made tents. When he worked on Babylon 5 he knew the path by heart, not by left and right directions, but with tactile memory and instinct. That sense of direction had eroded over time. Downbelow was an ever-changing mass of humanity. Growing. Not thriving. It was full of disease, addiction and misery, and more tenants arrived every day he was there. Houses built of packing crates, broken furniture, garbage -- whatever the homeless could find to manufacture some kind of stability. As quickly as they went up the villages went back down, like the ebb and tide of a sentient sea. He could swear he could see the tents sprouting from the bulkheads as he walked.

One of the shadows pulled form the wall. Large, powerful. Franklin doubled his pace. The shadow pursued him. 

This had to be a product of the coma. Franklin put on speed from a walk to a run to a sprint, dodging the same tents and boxes down endless long hallways. The sound of the reclamators thrummed from all directions. He could feel his body changing – Porzm fueled by the rush of blood and anxiety. The world swam, his heart raced, his hands shook with continuous tremors as the shelters shifted closer. Impeding progress. Getting underfoot. 

The shape behind him didn’t speak. It walked like a man, heeled boots clomping heavily on the grating. A cape billowed behind it. In his heart he knew it held a scythe. 

“I know what you are!” Franklin shouted over his shoulder. “I won't let you won’t take me!”

Franklin dodged a stack of packing crates and tripped over an exposed pipe and hit the crosshatched grating with a painful raking slide. His stomach lurched, but he tamped it down. Fear rippled through him like a pulse. It was a pulse. It was his pulse. Electricity like a pace maker, the charge of the natural actuator of his heart, perhaps even a defibrillator. At least his heart was beating. The tick of blood in his temples carried chemicals to cause fright. To make him run. To allow his ancestors to escape. Franklin flopped onto his back and scooted himself into the draping tarps, ready to rip and tear with the power of the cannibals. 

The path behind him was empty. The dark figure was gone.

Franklin panted. The hallucinations were worsening. What did this mean for the Prozm? Oxygen deprivation? Blood loss? How long did he have?

“Hello Stephen.” A smooth, deep voice said from directly above him.

Franklin leaped full-bodied into the air like a cat. He threw his back against the opposite wall and faced his assailant with the steady woosh of blood coursing past his ears. 

Ambassador G’Kar sat eye-level on the pile of trash before him, his gold and leather armor glinted like his eyes which stared out from his shadowed face: one red and one blue. 

Franklin gulped. “You’re not real.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because...” Franklin swallowed again. He was feeling faint. The palms of his hands were cold and clammy. “You’re dead.”

G’Kar’s eyes crinkled in a smile. “Yes I am.”

“And your eyes… I fixed them.”

“Yes you did.”

Franklin’s pulse slowed. That’s right, this was a hallucination. He was the one in control. “So what are you really? The spirit of death?”

“Is that what you think?” G’Kar pulled one knee up, reclining on the trash. “That would be romantic, wouldn’t it?”

“But you chased me!”

“I just wanted to talk, you’re the one who ran.” He broke eye contact. It felt like being released from an electric current. “What would happen if I was the spirit of death? Did you think you could escape?”

“I can and will,” Franklin said. “They’re trying to revive me right now. The best doctors are on it.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’m important, damnit.” Franklin stepped forward. “I have an epidemic to cure.”

“Other people can cure your epidemic.”

“No. It's my job. I'm the one.” Franklin stopped himself short. “I don’t know why I’m wasting my time explaining it to you.”

Franklin marched past without speaking. 

“Awful rude, Doctor,” G’Kar said. 

He had to find his clinic. His illness was getting worse. Even walking was more difficult. Weakness made each leg lift ache more than the last. His feet were heavy, and impact shook him all the way to the base of his skull.

The Narn swung in from a branching hallway on the left. “You’re slowing down, Dr. Franklin.”

“It’s the illness.”

“So you think.”

“It is.” 

“Have you considered your cause is actually your affect?” G’Kar asked. “That you are creating your reality?”

“I don’t have to listen to you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re not real.”

“Ah yes.” G’Kar’s voice was like pooling oil. Franklin could feel it eke its way under his skin. “I am not real, like this place is not real, like your body is not real, but this illness… it is real.”

Franklin clenched his jaw so hard the joint popped. “Stop talking.”

“Why should I? You’re not listening to me. I can say what I please and it shouldn’t matter.”

“It matters because its distracting me.”

“That may be a favor.” The Narn’s voice answered from a few paces back. Franklin was leaving him behind. The doctor gained strength and purpose. He put on more speed.

When G’Kar spoke again, it was in echo. “I’m not the spirit of death and I am not your imagination. I am in fact the same friend you lost over ten years ago, here to help you through this difficult time and you’re running from me. Don’t worry, I’m not angry. I know it can be hard to accept. Not everyone looked death in the face the way I did. And Marcus did. And John did while we’re at it. None of us fought it.”

The path ahead was crowded with garbage and filth. Franklin dragged his feet through it, kicking hidden shapes, tripping over unseen obstacles. He collapsed into a wooden shelter and the phantom inside vanished. Eyes watched him, but just as many stared past, looking back at the shadow shaped as G’Kar. 

“I respect you for this,” the Narn’s voice reverberated. “And pity you. Either way, there’s no reason to be ashamed of wanting to live. You know more about the mechanics of the body than anyone else I know. You are a miracle worker. It makes sense you would want to pull off one more miracle before the end.”

“I’m not dead.” Franklin muttered. “Not dead. Not yet.”

He labored on, no longer searching for his lab. He was lost in every way, unsure of where he was going and not willing to look back lest he meet G’Kar again. Franklin could feel the pursuer's footsteps reverberate through the floor. He shut his eyes tight. He had to remember what he was there for. What had happened and was still happening in the firing of his own brain. He had to cure the epidemic, that was most important. And no matter how it sounded, how it looked or what it said, the thing behind him was a phantom. It was not G’Kar.

The Narn stepped into the hallway in front of him. “Dr. Franklin.”

“Ahh!” Franklin recoiled and stumbled backward. He scrambled in attempt to run but his legs would not obey him. 

G’Kar closed the gap between them in two strides and wrenched the struggling doctor up with incredible strength. “You’re running from yourself, Stephen. You don't want to listen to me, but I will make you. Look into my face!”

Franklin craned his neck away as far as he could get. A gloved hand grabbed his chin and forced him to face front. The eyes that stared back were both red, both natural, both afire with pure force burning deeper than their sockets.

“You have strength, Franklin. And power. This we both know to be true. Of all the wrong perceptions you are trapped in, you are correct about one thing. This place is of your making. It feeds upon your memory. Your anxiety has warped it into a cage for your own mind.”

It was delusion. Franklin shut his eyes. G’Kar shook him once. Franklin looked back into the twin magnets boring into him from above. 

“You’re hurting yourself, Stephen. I was called here to come help you. Open your mind to possibility.”

“You aren't help," Franklin stated. "You are a phantom from the regrets of my past. A monster who’d kill his best friend with his own bare hands, here to murder me too before I can do what needs to be done.”

G'Kar's hands lost their grip. Franklin's weight hit his own feet like a hammer blow. Franklin looked back up and saw a tear glistening in his captor’s eye. “Is that really how you remember me?”

A twinge contracted Franklin’s heart, radiating pain up his throat and down his spine. He never expected his phantom to waver. You can’t make the existential ghost of your own death cry.

G’Kar drew a breath and moved his hands to Franklin’s shoulders, as if finding steadiness of his own. The Narn pressed his lips tight and lowered his voice to the soft wisened tone Franklin knew as a Prophet. “I’m not telling you to give up. I never would say that. You should fight defeat with every drop of strength you have left, but things here… they take on a different nature than the living world. Whether you believe it’s the afterlife or you believe it’s a delusion doesn’t matter to me in the slightest. The fact remains that you will kill yourself if you continue as you are."

"How can I kill myself when you say I am already dead?"

The sarcasm had no affect on G'Kar. He squeezed Franklin's shoulders in what almost looked like desperation. "It is a death unlike your bodily passing. A corruption caused by forcing a false belief on yourself, despite the truth your heart already knows. It will make you change."

"What do you mean change?"

"Your body," G'Kar said. "Your mind. You'll become inhuman."

"And how do you propose I stop it."

"Admit to yourself what is true.” 

“What is true, then, G’Kar?” Franklin challenged. “What do you want me to say? That I’m dead. That I’m in Hell?”

“Is that what you believe?”

“I don’t believe in Hell.”

G’Kar nodded. “And what do you believe in?”

Franklin breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth. “I believe that I am a doctor. That I'm the pacifist son of a general. That' I’m suffering from the Porzm epidemic, I’m in a coma, and I’m doing what is necessary to get out.”

G’Kar blinked slowly. “And what is that?”

“I have to find my lab.”

“Where is it?”

“Down here, in brown sector,” Franklin said. “It’s the clinic I established when I served as chief medical officer. I made it for people who were too poor or sick to treat themselves. Some called it a charity, but it was the backbone of what it meant to be a physician. Help those who need help. No matter what is true or not in this nightmare, I believe that with all my heart.”

G’Kar exhaled and nodded. “So what did the clinic look like?”

“It was small. Only a couple rooms with limited supplies. We couldn’t keep much down there because the lurkers would steal drugs and equipment to use them or sell them. It was never enough, but it was what was approved. Still, I would run down with drugs in a backpack every so often. Medbay had plenty. They never really noticed. Just like they never noticed it being used as a smuggling point for telepaths on the underground railroad.”

"A bit of a vigilante weren't you?" G'Kar said. "Always fighting for the weak."

"Someone had to." 

"That's a very good truth," G'Kar said. "It doesn't have to end, even if your state of existence changes your heart does not. Don't become lost in the chaos of thoughts and fears. That one belief is your center."

Franklin raised his head. His hands had stopped shaking. The woosh of his pulse had dulled, but he could still feel his heart beating like a drum against his ribs.

G'Kar's shoulders relaxed, his face warm. At some point in the chase his cape and armor had become his civilian leather coat. The Narn broke eye contact, focusing on something above and behind Franklin's right shoulder. “This clinic of yours. Did it have a sign?”

“Yes. It wasn't anything fancy. It said the word 'clinic' In every language I could translate.”

"Like that?" G’Kar turned him around and there it was, the clinic he was hunting for, exactly as he remembered it. 

How had he missed it as he ran through the labyrinth? He must have passed it a dozen times. The question wobbled in Franklin's mind like a plate losing its spin. 

No. Focus on G'Kar's words. Truth was the key in this world. He didn't miss the clinic as he passed it because the clinic wasn’t there before he found it. This was all lost in his mind. All he saw and touched was because he willed it into being. 

"Go on, Dr. Franklin," G'Kar whispered. "Its your place of healing. Go in. Be healed."

“Believe what it real,” Franklin repeated. “No lies. No excuses.”

He didn’t notice G’Kar’s hands leave his shoulders, only that in his next breath Franklin was alone. No ghosts. No death. No Narn. Just Franklin and his clinic -- a place where he could put right the things he knew were wrong.


End file.
